Category Archives: Published Writing

Over the last 12 months I have written 30,909 words, had 29 texts published, worked with 20 clients, and presented at 5 public speaking engagements (in parallel to working 1-3 days/week as an art administrator). It’s been a challenging year personally and professionally but I’ve really enjoyed the range of opportunities and experiences – here are some of the highlights of my 2017 calendar.

An apologetic selfie featuring the work of Juan Alcazaren in Art Informal’s stand at Art Fair Philippines, February 2017

MARCHAfter writing for the web edition for some time, my first print review for ArtAsiaPacific was published in Issue 102 of the Hong Kong-based magazine, covering Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect With Everything at MCA Australia.

ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 102, March-April 2017

APRIL
I headed to Kandos, a small town in the Central West of New South Wales, to cover the biennial grassroots Cementa Festival for ArtAsiaPacific and Art Monthly Australasia. It had everything from parkour to indigenous stargazing.

MAY-JUNE
This was a time for composing artists’ catalogue essays, notably for Ioulia Terizis’ show at Photoaccess, Canberra, Lucas Davidson at Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, and Leahlani Johnson at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, NSW.

SEPTEMBER
September saw the first of my ‘In The Galleries’ column published in Art Monthly Australasia. It was a professional milestone to be invited to contribute a regular print column, previewing commercial shows in every state and territory around the country.

Art Monthly Australasia, Issue 301, September 2017

OCTOBERThe National Art School introduced their Launchpad professional development program, and as well as appearing on a panel discussion the previous month, in October I was invited to mentor students in the Biography Workshop.

NOVEMBERAnother international print milestone: my first review for Frieze, covering Diena Georgetti’s show at The Commercial, Sydney was published in Issue 191 of the London-based publication.

Frieze, Issue 191, November-December 2017

DECEMBER
As the year drew to a close I made my final edits to Bad Habits, a private publication celebrating the art collection of Bonita Croft and Gene Zemaitis. It was a privilege to again work with advisor and curator John Cruthers for this project.

2017 SURPRISE BONUS TRACK
In August, with the help of a translator, I gave a lecture on Art History & Aesthetics at the Sydney launch of Chinese permanent makeup brand Bicasso, complete with ribbon-cutting ceremony, and champagne sprayed Formula One-style on stage.

Cutting the ribbon with representatives of Bicasso and the Australia China Commercial Association (I’m second from right). Image: ACCA

Wishing you health, happiness and surprising art experiences in 2018. See you then!
– Chloé

In January I was invited to Singapore to experience Art Week – my second such trip in as many years. I covered the major South-East Asian fair Art Stage Singapore, as well as the exhibition Time of Othersat Singapore Art Museum, for Art Monthly. While I was there I also explored the recently unveiled National Gallery of Singapore, checked out the respected Singapore Tyler Print Institute, and, along with many others, braved the rain during cultural precinct Gillman Barracks’ Art After Dark. Highlights of that experience included the Joan Jonas survey exhibition They come to us without a word at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Antipodean Inquiry, curated by Owen Craven at Yavuz Gallery.

Gillman was also occupied by a collection of shipping containers re-purposed as exhibition spaces by emerging Singaporean artists. It was great to see Singapore’s cultural life on the up-and-up and I hope to have the opportunity to return next year to see how things are evolving.

The pieces I wrote in response to Time of Others and Art Stage can be read in the March 2016 edition of Art Monthly, which marks a turning point in the magazine’s history as it widens its focus to Australia and the Asia-Pacific. The March issue is an Asian special exploring Australia’s historic and contemporary engagement with Asia across the visual arts, in celebration of the magazine’s newly expanded masthead. It’s humbling to be in printed company with such contributors as Russell Storer and Mami Kataoka – I hope you have a chance to check out the newly re-titled Art Monthly Australasia.

Art Collector Issue 75 has hit the shelves. The 50 things collectors need to know in 2016 issue features profiles of standout shows and artists, trends and taste-makers. I’ve contributed pieces on up-and-coming photographer Ashleigh Garwood, and arts policy campaign #FreeTheArts. Get thee to a newsagent and get in on the action!

Art Monthly produced a cracker summer feminism-themed issue, guest edited by Dr Susan Best and Louise Mayhew. The issue includes pieces on feminist curatorial practice, activist art and queer art, as well as a centrefold with a difference – Mayhew’s timeline of women’s art collectives in Australia.

Writing a feminism-focussed round-up of the year in Australian art gave me pause for thought about the nation’s attitude to women more generally, particularly in light of 2015’s political goings-on. While it was a relief to leave behind Tony Abbott, Minister for Women, Turnbull’s respect-for-women rhetoric seems at this point to be mostly just lip service to the issue.

Just as citizens have reclaimed phrases such as ‘Destroy the Joint‘ and ‘Binders full of Women‘ in recent times, Peter Dutton’s ‘Mad f***ing witch‘ comment has similarly energised people in 2016. It will be interesting to revisit this issue in 12 months’ time and see if and how we have evolved.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of interviewing the wonderful New Zealand-born, London-based artist Francis Upritchard for The Journal of Australian Ceramics. This issue, themed around colour, was guest-edited by Sydney artist Madeleine Preston.

It was great chatting with Francis and learning about the handmade pottery that surrounded her growing up, her accidental foray into a ceramics practice, and her current work breaking down boundaries between art, craft and design. Why are people unwilling to pay as much for a bowl as a painting?

The issue profiles many fantastic artists working in ceramics, including the excellent Apprentice Welder works by Yasmin Smith (written about by my Runway colleague Miriam Kelly). The cover stars are Lynda Draper and David Ray, whose works signify the playful, colourful tendencies in ceramics as it is currently being employed in contemporary art practice.

The first regular writing gig I managed to wrangle once I’d made the leap into freelance life in late 2013, was with RAVEN Contemporary. I, along with a slew of great writers worked initially under Georgia Sholl and subsequent editor Rebecca Gallo to produce reviews, gallery guides and opinion pieces exploring the world of contemporary art in an accessible way.

RAVEN, published by 10 Group, was wound up at the end of June this year but has been archived so that its content can continue to be available for interested readers. If you haven’t explored it before (or even if you have), take the time to bookmark the new url and check out some of my recent highlights from some of RAVEN’s great writers:

I’ll miss writing for RAVEN, particularly the things I learned interviewing artists, researching galleries, and having the opportunity to cover Singapore Art Week. The experience had a profound impact on my development as an arts writer for which I’m very grateful.

The archive of the more than 20 pieces I wrote for RAVEN can be found here.

The cultural theme park of Haw Par Villa in Singapore was the subject of Jess Bradford’s recent exhibition at Archive Space. Originally conceived as a space of moral education for families, the internal narratives of the site have been subject to de- and re-construction, both physically and conceptually. Having visited there as a child, Bradford was prompted to return recently after discovering photographs of the site’s painted concrete sculptures in second hand stores. The exhibition Haw Par Villa saw the artist reconsider the park through an investigation of materiality and memory.

Just inside the gallery’s entrance was a wooden archway which Bradford had cut and painted to refer to the forms of the Villa itself. Weather-worn wave and cave formations were painterly rendered on the front of the structure, while on the reverse the artist had made no attempt to disguise its stand-in nature, securing the angular pieces of ply with the help of sandbags. Propped and propositional, this structure arched physically and metaphorically over the other works in the show, providing a portal through which the truths and fictions of representation could be considered.

Beyond the archway was a video piece depicting a walk through the villa through the eyes of a visitor. The footage began with a trip through a tunnel to the Haw Par Villa station. Filmed from the front of a driverless train, the perspective of this journey evoked the experience of a ghost train, pre-empting the theme park to come. A recording of a woman’s voice announced arrival at “Haw Par Villa” through a PA system, before the viewer was led through the gates of the park at a walking pace, to an accompanying ambient soundtrack. This sense of forward motion, combined with symmetrical one-point perspective, echoed the experience of walking through Bradford’s propped archway into Archive Space itself.

For several years now the artist has collected anonymous found photographs, and her recent practice has led to the recreation of these as objects intended to resonate beyond their pictorial surface. Two such photographs of the concrete figures in Haw Par Villa were incorporated into this exhibition in this way. The images, a bear seeming to attack a small child, and two mermaids, were painted in monochrome on small pieces of primed zinc. These were mounted within frames on the wall, making reference to their photographic origins, however once the viewer drew closer to examine the detail in these tiny objects, their presence beyond the fragility of paper became clear. The original photographer had transformed them from concrete to image, and Bradford had in turn translated this depiction to artefact, giving tangibility to someone else’s memories whilst adding to the compilation of images surrounding her own.

Re-encountering a place of childhood experience after so many years requires a reassessment of truth and reality. Disparate images can become worn away as concrete does when exposed to the elements, over which twisted memories form slowly, creeping and overtaking like lichen. Haw Par Villa interwove different modes and media to interrogate ideas of authorship, truth, representation and memory.

In a film made with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne recently, influential British artist Tacita Dean thoughtfully discussed the future of the film-based arts in the face of the rise of digital photography. Just as analogue photography supposedly heralded the ‘death of painting’ in the mid-19th Century, this phenomenon appears to be increasingly preoccupying the art world, as evidenced by a number of current Sydney exhibitions.

I spent a day checking out Suburban Noir at the Museum of Sydney, and Beijing Silvermine at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Suburban Noir asked contemporary Australian artists to respond to forensic police photographs of Sydney from the early- to mid-20th Century, the results being sometimes sinister, sometimes melancholy. In a very different take on the found photograph, Beijing Silvermine is collector-curator Thomas Sauvin’s re-appropriation and re-activation of many thousands of discarded domestic photographs from more recent decades. (You can read my review of this extraordinary project over at RAVEN Contemporary.)

And then of course there is Christian Boltanski’s mammoth work Chance, currently on view at Carriageworks. Boltanski has often incorporated found photographs as a medium alongside others when describing collective and individual memory. Here his use of anonymous photographic subjects, as well Chance’s physical allusion to the increasingly redundant printing press, become threads to draw the audience into greater existential questions. Ultimately, that’s how every medium should serve its author and its audience.

Damien Minton Gallery decided to cap off 2013 with a series of One Night Stands – 14 exhibitions over 14 consecutive nights. As a former gallerina I can vouch for how exhausting just one opening night can be, and how the relative quiet of the subsequent days provides a chance to catch up on work that has been left behind in the rush of the launch. Well, no chance of such welcome respite at DMG. Gallerist Damien Minton is constantly trying different approaches to getting people through the door and looking at the art (dwindling visitor numbers being the scourge of the commercial gallery in the online age). So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he held 14 openings at the most hectic time of the year, finishing just three days before Christmas. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

Sydney artist Connie Anthes‘ project took the stage on 17 December. Anthes elected to keep the walls blank and instead drew the crowds towards the work of 20 artists contained within a set of plan drawers in the middle of the gallery. I have just published a review of her intriguing exhibition Low Relief that I invite you to read over on Das Platforms.